Changeling

Changeling
Clint Eastwood | US | 2008
140 min

In any Clint Eastwood film you never know what to expect, except perhaps for two things — a good drama drained of any form of sentimentality and an exploration of a grim subject matter.  Changeling is no different. It advances Eastwood’s classical, old-school filmmaking techniques that rely on good storytelling, strong performances and fabulously restrained camera work. The setting of the film, L.A. in the late 1920′s, allows Eastwood to cast Angelina Jolie and her pouty red lips as a mother whose son goes missing, is eventually found by the largely corrupt police department, only for her to reject him as not being her real son.

The setup sounds vaguely modern, like the Jodie Foster starrer Flightplan, except this film is apparently based on a true story and feels realistic enough to be one. It is not really a thriller in the conventional sense; just the same way that Eastwood’s Mystic River wasn’t a thriller but also involved a missing child. The situations in both these films allow the director to explore his misplaced characters (Jolie in this film, Sean Penn in River) in environments where they feel lost and uncertain and are compelled to take action. Because this is an Eastwood film (and we can now safely say, there is such a thing as that), its tone is angry yet restrained. When we find out how the police might be playing her, first for raw publicity, then as scapegoat, we are certain they will not go unpunished. For this the film benefits immensely from the services of John Malkovich as a Reverend hell bent on exposing the LAPD’s corrupt hierarchy. In this, the film functions as an expose, not unlike the noir classic L.A. Confidential.

But Eastwood has higher aspirations. All of his films start as being one thing on the surface, but become something else as they progress and as we watch. Million Dollar Baby was about a female boxer, but became something more, uniquely so. Flags of our Fathers and its Japanese double bill Letters from Iwo Jima were about war propaganda but soon shed that skin and became more meaningful, almost resonant. Changeling is cut from the cloth and is just as devastating in its impact as each of those, though never for shock value and it certainly feels more ambitiously flawed as a result — the script, credited to Babylon 5 creator and frequent comic book writer J. Michael Straczynski starts to feel as if it has bitten off more than it can chew. The third act courtroom drama and its later repercussions feel a bit forceful, but ultimately prove their necessity in providing closure, both for the audience and the characters we see.